Saturday, June 09, 2007

Last night in Atlanta Alfonso Soriano homered in each of his first three plate appearances before being intentionally walked, grounding out, and then singling in the ninth inning. His four for five day led the Cubs to a 9-1 victory over the Braves. After a fairly slow start (.270/.392/.308 in April) he hit .302/.500/.362 in May and is 19 for 37 in June a double, 2 triples, and 6 homeruns giving him 10 homeruns for the season. This season he's as aggressive as ever seeing 3.69 pitches per plate appearance and in the metrics on plate discipline I discussed the other day he swings at the highest percentage of pitches (54.8%) that are out of the strike zone of anyone not named Ivan Rodriguez. However, he's just about average in terms of the percentage of strikes he lets by (23%). In any case everything is working for him at the moment and on Friday night he jumped on the first pitch three times. Here are his five plate appearances from Friday night along with a chart of all the pitches he saw.

The number in the upper right hand corner indicate the pitch number along with the starting velocity, ending velocity, and break of the pitch. The pitches are color-coded and their shapes follow this key (you can click on any of the images to make them bigger):